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1.0 - Introduction

1.2 - Recap

  • In the previous course:

Ansible for Beginners

  • Ansible was introduced, showing how it can be used for a variety of operations e.g.@
  • Infrastructure Provisioning
  • Configuration Management

  • Application Deployment

  • Various use case examples were shown and discussed for public and private cloud infrastructure.

  • Ansible installation was discussed:
# Fedora
yum install ansible

# Ubuntu
apt-get install ansible

# PIP
pip install ansible
  • Modules such as the following were discussed:
  • System
  • Commands
  • Files
  • Database
  • Cloud
  • Windows
  • Variables were shown to be usable in playbooks, as well as conditionals and loops - all will be expanded upon in the course.

1.4 - Note on Enabling SSH in the VMs

  • Ensure /etc/apt/sources.list has been updated with the following 2 lines:
    1. deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ansible/ansible/ubuntu trusty main
    2. deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian sid main
  • Comment the line starting deb cdrom
  • Uncomment the 2 lines starting deb and deb-src
  • Run the following:
apt-get update
apt-get install openssh-server
service sshd start

1.6 - Environment Setup: Virtualbox

  • Use ifconfig -a to get the IP address for the machine
  • Generally can just clone or create 2 other VMs after the controlplane creation.
  • Ansible Installation:
  • Once installed on the required systems, create an inventory file for the target systems in the form of:
<hostname> ansible_host=<IP address> ansible_ssh_pass=<password>
  • Test inventory usage with the example ping module:
ansible <target hostname> -m ping -i inventory.txt
  • Note: One may need to modify the /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg file to disable host key checking, or just ssh to the systems from the controlplane; for practice, either are fine.

1.7 - Environment Setup: Docker Containers

  • Ensure running a machine (VM or typical host) with Ansible and Docker installed.
  • One can then deploy multiple containers with base ubuntu images. (Example Image)
  • The containers will be auto-assigned an IP based on Docker's internal network (172.17.0.<x> range)
  • Verify installation via ansible and docker
  • Create docker containers: docker run -it -d <image> (or use a Docker-compose file)
  • Use docker inspect <container id> to get the container IPs
  • Create an inventory file for each container and test connection with the ping module.
  • Username:: root
  • Password:: Passw0rd